ting-pot with heat and exhaustion, but there are
counter-balancing advantages; one can live for weeks at a time without
heating the stove; indeed, it is pleasanter indoors without fire, and
lighting will cost very little, now the evenings are short.

In winter it was different. An inclement sky, an enfeebled sun, a sick
day, and a burning, biting frost!

People, too, were different. A bitterness came over them, and they went
about anxious and irritable, with hanging head, possessed by gloomy
despair. It never even occurred to them to tear their neighbor's bite
out of his mouth, so depressed and preoccupied did they become. The days
were months, the evenings years, and the weeks--oh! the weeks were
eternities!

And no one knew of their misery but the winter wind that tore at their
roofs and howled in their all but smokeless chimneys like one bewitched,
like a lost soul condemned to endless wandering.

But there were bright stars in the abysmal darkness; their one pride and
consolation were the Pidvorkes, the inhabitants of the aforementioned
district of that name. Was it a question of the upkeep of a Reader or of
a bath, the support of a burial-society, of a little hospital or refuge,
a Rabbi, of providing Sabbath loaves for the poor, flour for the
Passover, the dowry of a needy bride--the Pidvorkes were ready! The sick
and lazy, the poverty-stricken and hopeless, found in them support and
protection. The Pidvorkes! They were an inexhaustible well that no one
had ever found to fail them, unless the Pidvorke husbands happened to be
present, on which occasion alone one came away with empty hands.

The fair fame of the Pidvorkes extended beyond Pereyaslav to all poor
towns in the neighborhood. Talk of husbands--they knew about the
Pidvorkes a hundred miles round; the least thing, and they pointed out
to their wives how they should take a lesson from the Pidvorke women,
and then they would be equally rich and happy.

It was not because the Pidvorkes had, within their border, great, green
velvety hills and large gardens full of flowers that they had reason to
be proud, or others, to be proud of them; not because wide fields,
planted with various kinds of corn, stretched for miles around them, the
delicate ears swaying in sunshine and wind; not even because there
flowed round the Pidvorkes a river so transparent, so full of the
reflection of the sky, you could not decide which was the bluest of the
two. Pereyaslav at any